Advance Packaging 5000 5K

It’s a little weird signing up for an event knowing that you will PR. I guess I sort of feel like PR’s ought to be a surprise, so when I decided to do a 5K last night because I needed to do a 3 mile tempo run this week for my training plan, I felt like I was cheating. My plan said I needed to run 3 miles at a 7:03 pace. Last week I’d had difficulty keeping that pace for only 2 miles so I was hoping the adrenalin from the race would help me out.

The course for the Advance Packaging 5000 is extremely flat and a great course for a PR. The winds, however, were another story. I ran the first half mile of my warmup into the wind and could barely break a 10 minute mile. I was already nervous enough (I don’t like running races in the evening) and that did not bode well at all.

Racing, however, can do amazing things for one’s pace. As the gun was fired and I started running, I looked down at my Garmin and remembered the days when that initial over-exuberant start dropped my pace to an eight minute mile and I was thrilled. Last night, seeing that we were running at a 5:15 made me pull back and laugh to myself at how things have changed. I would now feel horrible if I saw an 8 minute mile at the start! I was hoping to run a flat seven minute mile, which would give me a time of 21:42 and cut about a minute off of my last 5K time in December. The miles flew by: 6:49, 6:52, 6:42. I, who have never run a full sub-seven minute mile, ran three of them in a row!

I also passed the woman who was in front of me the whole time and came in second for women, twenty-fifth overall, and the first in my age group. My new 5K PR now stands at 21:11 and my next task is to run twelve seconds faster! The woman who won finished in 19:15. I would have had to run a full two minutes faster to beat her!

It was fun to see my husband and baby at the finish line. I ended up with one of those weird looking finish line pictures – like I’m trying to run in place or something.

I also got interviewed by the local paper that was covering the run. The guy was nice enough to ask if the first place woman and I were running together at some point and when did she start pulling away? I appreciated that he gave me the benefit of the doubt and thought I could run that fast!

I feel a little silly as a mature thirty-year-old mom getting excited over the fact that I ran faster last night than I ever have in my life, but I am. What a fun feeling to see those miles fly by!